My first experience with Cantai has been VERY disappointing. Running Win 10 and latest Dorico and Cantai versions as of three days ago. First attempt there was no sign of rendering and the vocal line would not play back. Second third and fourth attempts on two different scores Cantai plugin started rendering and crashed Dorico after a couple of seconds, restarting my computer (first Dorico crash ever after years of trouble free operation). One of those times a message flashed momentarily at the top of the plugin window saying rendering was not reachable (or something like that). Attached is the diagnostic file created when reopening Dorico hub after the last crash.
I’ve been looking forward to trying Cantai for a couple of months and waited until beta was finished to avoid this kind of buggy experience. Looks like beta ended prematurely. Any help resolving this would be greatly appreciated.
Yes, unfortunately installing and using Cantai right now is not exactly just plug and play but it is doable by most folks. So, the key items seem to be:
Update Dorico to 6.2.20
Install the Playback Template from the Dorico Blog
Enable Remote Control when asked during setup/first use
Ensure that Dorico’s Pre-roll setting is set to zero
I may be omitting something but I think these are main things.
I did three of the four on the list but did not use a playback template to assign the instance to the player. I assigned it by creating a VST instance and assigning it to the player, then clicking the e button to configure it. That is a standard work flow and my preferred one in Dorico since playback templates have created issues for me in the past for my more complicated scores where I want custom assignments that cannot be programmatically applied with a sequence of sources listed in a playback template. The score I am trying to render is super simple - flute and alto voice.
This morning I tried applying a Note Performer + Cantai template in case this made a difference. The Cantai popup gave a message “rendering engine unreachable” and playback is with the sine tone, but no crash. However, if I assign a different voice it attempts to render and then crashes.
So it seems the problem is that the rendering engine is unavailable for some reason. I’ve watched the videos and followed the instructions and did a standard install. Maybe I need to de-install and install again.
This is a different problem, I think!
Did you get the Cantai 2.2 update? (Some have had more luck with the first release 2.1 - not the beta - version.)
There are a number of threads with posts regarding this “unreachable” message. I think some have found a workaround. I think Windows interferes somehow.
And… as alway when installing new software (and pending Updates), try rebooting!
Yes, I waited until the 2.2 update 'cause it said it fixed some crash issues and other things. I searched the forum but didn’t see anything about rendering engine unreachable. I’ll look again.
I saw that every time in 2.2 (Win 10). The message went away after about 30 seconds. Sometimes it rendered, most of the time there is no rendering at all. I had to drop back to 2.1.
ALWAYS save all your install files in case you have to revert to a prior release.
The company ought to keep alike active for 2.1 because 2.2 is obviously very troublesome. Unless you really enjoy chasing bugs for hours, I strongly recommend that at least Win 10 users remain on 2.1 until there is a stable release.
I never downloaded 2.1 and don’t see an option for 2.1 download on my profile - only a single button for Windows that downloads 2.2. So I guess I’m stuck for now. The waiting game continues …
One thing I found is sometimes it just won’t playback on a score but worked fine on a different score. The challenge I have is they’re different files of the same score. So I can’t figure out why it worked on one and not the other. It can be temperamental. But all settings being the same, one I hear voices and the other I don’t. I really wish they would give an easy way to preview voices. I have a very large score that takes forever to render and find the voice I picked completely wrong style so have to render again to switch to another vocalist that can take 10 minutes per part. I can end up waiting 30 or 40 minutes to find out I picked the wrong voice. Why no preview option? But I guess that’s not that big a problem if I write a smaller score just to try out voices for the big score.
@kazzy Thanks for the offer, but I’ll wait until I can get it working on my computer. I have other things to work on meanwhile.
@Derrek Thanks for the tip. The Cantai playback template should actually be useful for quicker setup of larger pieces with choir and soloists (once Cantai is able to render).
It’s an absolute mess! Granted, I had my pre-roll set to -0.5, but even after fixing that, Cantai hangs on short notes (i.e. keeps singing) and it’s only rendering half the voices, despite saying it’s done… Sigh!
Many of us feel that pain. Just to validate: you’re using v6.2.2 of Dorico, version 2.2 of Cantai and you enabled remote control when prompted on first use of Cantai. You have already validated that pre-roll is set correctly. So, if all of these have been validated, I would go to the Cantai.app website click on the little chat bot on in the lower right corner and share the issue along with what you have validated and ask the bot-critter for help.
Appease its questioning until it gives you an email link to contact someone for help then send an email about your issue, your machine specs and what you have validated. Richard’s pretty good about returning emails fairly quickly.
Edit — And, apparently v2.2 of Cantai can break on Windows machines with some folks finding the previous version (2.1) workable.
Thank you Kent, but it’s a little bit more complicated than that:
Firstly, the code they had sent me back in the Kickstarter didn’t work. It kept saying “not yet valid”. I used the bot thingy to ask for help, but all it did was send me an email with the conversation.
After two days of waiting, I decided to try to contact Richard through VI-control. I waited another day and nothing. So then I signed up for the Discord and tried to contact him there. He still hasn’t responded.
Finally, yesterday, I opened the Cantai website and the little bot was saying that it was a problem with 2.1 so please install 2.2. But after multiple crashes, voices hanging or not rendering I gave up and reported it to the bot again…
Do you have an email contact for Richard? Because after over a week, he hasn’t replied to any of my attempts.
